


of foie gras and ortolans

by loamvessel



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-11-05 10:34:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11011701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loamvessel/pseuds/loamvessel
Summary: "Sometime between when they opened Paddy’s and Dee getting pregnant, Mac- sick, no doubt, of Dennis’s hour long cold showers in the obscene hours of the morning- would come into his room and wrap his arms around Dennis as tight as he could and say Dennis, Dennis. And they would wake up with their arms around each other the next morning and by the time they’d be finished with breakfast everything would be back to normal and they’d never mention it again. And then, after a while, by unspoken agreement, they stopped entirely.It was one of the things that he hated most about Mac in the daytime, and one of the things he thought about most at night. So, when he gets back from Philly at 1AM and Mac still isn’t in and Dennis falls asleep in what continues to be the only bed in their apartment, it might be out of longing for another one of those long-past, half hazy late nights. It certainly isn’t because he’s expecting to get woken up three hours later, whacked in the face by a pillow wielded by his furious, mesh shirt-clad roommate."For Sinloi, who requested a post S12 fix-it.





	of foie gras and ortolans

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sinloi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sinloi/gifts).



"Have I told you," says Artemis pensively, "that Frank and I have incorporated gourmet confections into our lovemaking?" 

"No," says Dennis, and, in the bathroom of what he’s sure is the dirtiest bar in existence, right smack in the middle of Bismarck, North Dakota, he's not exactly sure he wants to know. 

"Our latest venture- the Ortolan. A forbidden delicacy- a songbird, drowned in Armagnac, roasted for eight minutes, and eaten whole. Forbidden in France to this day, and, for added scandal, placed between the breasts during copulation."

Scratch that. He absolutely did not want to know. 

“Look, Artemis,” he says, trying to keep his voice as steady as possible, “can you please, please just put Charlie on the line. What the hell are you doing at Charlie’s anyway?” 

“Spa night,” says Artemis, evasively. 

“Spa night?!” He can feel his already tenuous grasp on the situation slipping already. “Artemis, I don't think that man has ever showered a day in his life.” 

“Woah, there, cowboy. First of all, I'm at Dee’s. She’s nabbed, like, twenty bottles of tequila from the bar-I wanna do body shots. And, second of all, aren't you supposed to be up Mount Rushmore or something, living out domestic bliss with Babymama?”

Technically, Mount Rushmore is in South Dakota, but at this point Dennis doesn't have the energy to correct her. Especially not when he’s drunk out of his mind, with an already throbbing headache to the tune of I Can’t Feel My Face by the Weeknd. In some state he barely even remembers visiting, no less.

“Look,” he says, gathering up the remaining scraps of his composure, “can you just put Charlie on? 

“At your service, prettyboy.”

“And if Frank’s there, can you please, please, not let him know it’s me.” 

Silence on the other line, then:

“I’m starting a glacial mud mask from Iceland. It's absolutely divine-Who were we talking about again?”

"Frank! You know, the little- little balding man you bang in dumpsters! Jesus Christ!" 

"Alright, alright," says Artemis, clearly unfazed. "Hold your horses, pussycat. He'll be here in a minute." 

And the line goes quiet again, and he hears Artemis say, it’s Dennis, he wants to talk to you, and then, to his great, eternal, undying relief, Charlie picks up the phone and goes: “Dennis?” 

“Charlie,” he says. “Listen.” 

There's silence for a moment, and then a woman's voice on the other end-a strangely familiar woman's voice- says "Is that Dennis? Oh my god, is that Dennis?” 

“Dee,” says Charlie, “will you shut up for just one minute?"

“Shut up?” retorts the voice. “Shut up? Don’t you dare tell me to shut up, Charlie. As if you didn’t spend our entire last date talking about rats-"

There’s silence on the line again, and then Charlie picks up and says, “Sorry about that, dude. So- North Dakota, huh? What's that like.”

“That’s not important right now,” he says, because what else is there to say? That it’s weird and depressing, full of shopping centers and creepy little blue gas stations that are a bit like Wawa but not quite and women that he could certainly fuck if he wanted to, but after what happened the last time, is he really willing to risk it? That he’s spent a whole week and a half in a hotel and he  hasn’t even gone to see Mandy at all, that he doesn’t really have a clue where she lives even though he could probably look it up in the phonebook or something. If they still have phone books. “Charlie, listen to me. I left a bunch of stuff in Mac’s apartment- I need you to get it, okay, and mail it to me. Can you do that, dude?”

“What about Mac,” says Charlie. “Get Mac to do it.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not, dude? Listen, he would love to, I mean, he won’t stop talking about you. All the time, Dennis this, Dennis that. It’s really driving me up the wall, dude. He thinks you’re like, mad at him or something.”

“Why the hell would I be mad at him, Charlie?”

“Well,” says Charlie, with some hesitation. “We did blow up your car, and all. You know.”

He’s not wrong. And it was a great car, too, an all-terrain vehicle, a masterpiece of precision British engineering, blown up to absolute smithereens, and Dennis is pissed about it, absolutely infuriated, but there’s some small part of him that hoped it wasn’t the car that Mac was so worried about, but Dennis himself. Not even missing him, per se, but thinking about him once in awhile. But of course, it all came down to the car, that stupid car. Mac probably doesn’t even miss him at all-hell, he’s probably up to his eyes in dick right now, his worst concern that Dennis is gonna slap him with a lawsuit and Mac’ll have to pay for something for once in his goddamn life instead of just cutting the sleeves off of his roommate's T-shirts. 

“Well, tell Mac I don’t give a shit about the car. We’ll make Frank pay for it, the same as we always do.”

“Hold on there,” Charlie says. “I’m not telling Mac shit, okay. You want to talk to Mac, call him yourself.”

“Jesus Christ, Charlie. Can we just get back to the point?”

Charlie thinks about this for a minute. “Dude, okay, don’t be mad at me, but I may have forgotten the point.”

Dennis hangs up. 

To be perfectly honest, he isn’t entirely sure what he had meant to accomplish with that phone call. He didn’t really need his stuff-he could always buy more, and getting Charlie to send it to him was a lost cause from the beginning. The man could barely read, for Christsakes. And he hadn’t even begun to consider the Pepe Silvia incident. As far as plans went, that one was downright terrible, but he was tired and drunk and he needed to hear from the Gang again. Needed to be reassured that things were going on the way they always had, and that was it and there was nothing else behind it. Absolutely nothing.

Absolutely not the thought of Mac, whose cologne-which he packed entirely by accident, by the way-has been sitting in the bottom of Dennis' suitcase. Mac and his stupid glamour muscles and his dumb, weird tattoos and his bad habits. Mac, whose number he absolutely has not memorized, and who he absolutely, absolutely, isn’t drunk dialing right now . 

And then Mac picks up and his suspicious “Hello?” is the sweetest sound Dennis has ever heard. 

“Mac,” he says, not even bothering to disguise the relief in his voice. “It’s Dennis.”

“Dennis!” A moment of temporary elation, and then: “Dude I- I’m gonna fucking kill you. You know that, don’t you.”

“You blew up my car,” he says, not quite able to believe what he’s hearing. Mac’s angry at him. Mac missed him. Dennis assumed he would have forgotten by now. 

“You were going to walk out on us, dude,” says Mac. “I couldn’t let that happen.” And Dennis can't place it, but Mac’s voice sends a strange little pang through him. Not of loss, but something else. Annoyance, probably. He lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding, and when he speaks again his voice doesn't really sound like his. 

“Yes, well,” he says, and just like that, it dawns on him just how badly he wants to see Mac. To be close to him again. Not in a weird way, of course. It’s just good to have someone around. 

“So,” says Mac, and he’s using the voice he uses when Dennis has been out for a while and he hasn’t checked in, that faux casual tightness that could mean any number of things that Dennis doesn’t let himself consider too closely. “How’s Mandy.”

“Mandy?” He’s lying through his teeth. “Oh, she’s fine, Mandy’s fine. You know Mandy.”

“Well, I don’t, actually. I mean, we met, but only in passing, really. You probably know her a lot better than I do.” Mac pauses. “Den, are you okay? You sound a little strange. Have you been eating?”

It’s that Den that gets him. “You know what, Mac,” he says. “I don’t think this whole parenting thing is really for me.”

And thirteen hours later he’s on a flight back to Philly. 

***

Dennis has always been a quiet sleeper. Even his nightmares are about immobility. Trapped between two walls, locked in a box, in the trunk of a car, what have you. Sometimes when he does coke he dreams that the cocaine numbness has spread past his lips and through his entire body. Other times he dreams he’s on an operating table and a bunch of idiot surgeons are poking around in his stomach like it’s some kind of salad bowl. Sure, he couldn’t feel it, but that wasn’t really the point of the nightmare. Sometimes, and only rarely, he’ll have sex dreams, but he really, really doesn’t like to think of those. And sometime between when they opened Paddy’s and Dee getting pregnant, Mac- sick, no doubt, of Dennis’s hour long cold showers in the obscene hours of the morning- would come into his room and wrap his arms around Dennis as tight as he could and say Dennis, Dennis. And they would wake up with their arms around each other the next morning and by the time they’d be finished with breakfast everything would be back to normal and they’d never mention it again. And then, after a while, by unspoken agreement, they stopped entirely. 

It was one of the things that he hated most about Mac in the daytime, and one of the things he thought about most at night. So, when he gets back from Philly at 1AM and Mac still isn’t in and Dennis falls asleep in what continues to be the only bed in their apartment, it might be out of longing for another one of those long-past, half hazy late nights. It certainly isn’t because he’s expecting to get woken up three hours later, whacked in the face by a pillow wielded by his furious, mesh shirt-clad roommate. 

“What the hell, dude,” Mac hisses. “You could have at least told me you were coming back tonight.”

And Dennis should have some snap reply ready, but he’s too busy being transfixed by Mac, the flesh and blood reality of him, smelling like the cheap cologne he remembers so well he can almost taste it, but still overwhelms him all over again in real life. Mac. Here. In the apartment. That Mac’s attacking every one of Dennis’ exposed extremities with a down pillow isn’t really of as much consequence as it should be. 

But not quite. 

“Cut it out, dude,” he says, pushing Mac off him. “I was sleeping, dude, what the hell!”

“You stole my cologne, Dennis,” says Mac, in a tone that suggests that Dennis might’ve desecrated the graves of every single one of Mac’s ancestors. 

“You blew up my car, Mac,” says Dennis. 

“Oh, yeah,” says Mac offhandedly. “No big deal. Frank’ll pay for it, or something, he always does.” 

There’s silence for a moment, then Mac says, quietly: “Dude, if you weren’t, like, basically unconscious five seconds ago, I would beat the shit out of you.”

“Oh, you wish, Mcdonald. I could take you half asleep or not. I could even take you out sleeping.”

“You want to try it, huh?” Mac shoots back, but neither of them move. Dennis is conscious of Mac’s face inches away from his own, a smile playing loosely over his lips, and he doesn’t, absolutely does not think about kissing them. 

"I missed you, dude," says Mac, and his voice is an octave lower and a whole hell of a lot quieter. 

"Yeah," he says. "I-uh, me too." 

And the next thing he knows, Mac’s hugging him, and he’s hugging Mac back, and he smells so familiar and better than Dennis could have imagined, and it feels so good that he bites down the bile he feels rising in his throat for a minute and buries his head in the curve of Mac’s neck and they stay that way for a long, long time. 

***

And things are back to normal, more or less. The Gang has a way of doing that-their own weird, depraved little equilibrium. Everyone except him’s on community service for arson because of the whole Range Rover thing, which means a bunch of hot afternoons picking up trash off the freeway for the four of them and a bunch of hot afternoons sipping beer in a foldout lawn chair and making fun of them for him. Frank, after some grumbling, pays for the Range Rover- that is, buys an entirely new Range Rover, because the old one was shot to hell-even though everyone knew he would from the get-go. Everyone keeps catching Charlie and Dee together in weird places- the back office, the basement, and once, weirdly, the vents- which no one will explain to him, although he has a pretty good idea of what it means already. The two of them are basically inseparable now; she’s teaching him to read and apparently she’s the one human on Earth who can convey to him the function of the English alphabet, because somehow, miraculously, he’s making progress. 

And then there’s the debacle where Charlie invites Dee, for the first time, to play nightcrawlers. And, in a twist as equally miraculous as Charlie’s developing literacy skills, she demonstrates a frightening knack for it (probably a result of either her acting experience-he’s reluctant to concede that her ‘characters’ demonstrate any degree of skill- or her complete lack of moral standards) which annoys Frank so much he won’t speak to Charlie for a week. But he gets over it in the end, helped in part by Artemis, who shows up at his apartment every couple of days with a platter of filet mignon or a container of foie gras. 

And then one night he and Mac are driving back to the apartment and when he parks the Rover neither of them get out, they just sit there in silence. Ever since what he’s started thinking of as The North Dakota Incident, things have been different between him and Mac. He can feel it, and he knows Mac can too, although they barely look at each other. Something has grown between them, this much he’s sure of, and unlike neglect or trauma or any of the other stuff they’ve all got squirreled away, this thing demands to be dealt with, to be felt. 

“Mac,” he says, quietly. “When you realized you were gay, how did you know?”

In the dark he can feel Mac looking at him. “Well,” he returns, after a while, “it was that ticket scratcher thing. You remember that-you were there.”

“No- I mean, how did you know? Was there, um, someone, or did you just, kind of, uh-”

“Figure it out?”

“Yeah,” he says, throat dry. “Figure it out.” Mac doesn’t respond, and Dennis goes on like an idiot. “Because I think I- I mean, I don’t know. I mean, there might be someone. For me, that is.”

There’s another silence, this time much, much longer than the first, and finally, finally, Mac speaks. 

“Dude, if we’re being honest, uh. There was someone.” 

“Who?” His voice is barely a whisper. They’re looking at each other, now, eyes burning in the darkness, and something in him tells him that somehow, ever since he laid eyes on Mac that day under the bleachers, it would always come to this. 

“You,” says Mac simply. And Dennis leans in, and Mac leans in, too, and just like that they’re kissing in the front seat of Dennis’ brand new, (as of yet) un-torched Range Rover, and his hands are around Mac’s waist, and Mac’s hands are sliding up his back, and nothing in his life has ever felt this right, this insanely easy. 

And that’s the thing with them, he supposes. They’ve been through hell, the five of them, even Frank, although he’s done some particularly hellish things himself, but they always, always find some way to bounce back. And some part of him knows that, sooner or later, they’ll have to get to the bottom of everything, that it’ll be group therapy and meds and the shrink’s couch, but for now things are just fine. For now, things are as good as they’re ever going to get. 

 

 


End file.
